Fellow Laderians,

U.S. Senator Harry Reid has fallen victim to the "Greek Syndrome." Jimmy Snyder, a/k/a "Jimmy the Greek," a high-profile sports betting handicapper in Las Vegas and CBS-TV sports analyst, was booted off the air and out of the public eye for having had the temerity to respond to an on-camera question about why Black athletes dominated the NFL.

"The black is a better athlete to begin with because he's been bred to be that way – because of his high thighs and big thighs that goes up into his back, and they can jump higher and run faster because of their bigger thighs. This goes back all the way to the Civil War when during the slave trading, the owner – the slave owner would breed his big black to his big woman so that he could have a big black kid," said Jimmy.

I cringed when I saw that sound bite, not because he had said or did anything necessarily wrong, but because he had touched the third rail of political correctness by having the chutzpa to talk publicly about racial matters. After he was vilified in a sea of media and pundit regurgitation and mustered out of the public eye, many civil rights leaders came forth and sheepishly admitted that what Jimmy had said was essentially true.

Which brings us to Majority Leader Harry Reid, who was quoted in the book "Game Change" as having said in 2008 that Barack Obama could win the presidency because he was "light skinned" with "no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one." Again, many Black leaders agree that this issue of skin lightness is systemic in our American culture. Still, the great talking heads on 24/7 "news" were quick to call for his resignation as Majority Leader, similarly to what happened to Trent Lott when he was the Senate Majority Leader.

This editorial isn't about Lott, but it bears mentioning that the Republicans are screaming "double standard" because the Democrats haven't punished Reid like they did Lott in 2003 after he said during Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party: "When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years, either," meaning we'd all have been better off under Thurmond's campaign of segregation now, before, and forever. Anyone who believes these two incidents are similar in scope and intent has absolutely no sense of proportion.

But back to Harry Reid and Jimmy the Greek. Maybe their comments can be seen as insensitive and maybe not. But their real "mistake" was to proffer an opinion on matters of race. In this era of hyper-political correctness, discussions of racial issues are taboo, posing huge risks for people in the public eye who bring them up. The irony is, the only way were going to overcome many of the prejudices in our society is through an open and candid dialogue on all the racial, gender, religious, and political issues that divide us. That's the only way we're going to understand and appreciate each other.

We've elected an African-American President who, himself, threw down the gauntlet during his candidacy with a brilliant speach on race in America. And who better to take the initiative to lead us out of the darkness. As President Obama has said so many times before, let's make this a "teachable moment."

                                       JimSchmitt, Editor and Publisher